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Outsiders Feed Unrest in Syria, Assad Says

Damascus residents watched President Bashar al-Assad gave a live broadcast address, his fourth speech since the uprising in Syria began 10 months ago.Credit
Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Tuesday said the 10-month uprising in his country was the work of what he called “outsiders,” “terrorists,” the international news media and the Arab League, stressing that he would use an “an iron hand” against his foreign enemies.

“Those who stand in the middle are traitors,” he told a cheering crowd in a speech at Damascus University that was broadcast live. “There is no alternative.”

But to many Syrians, longtime allies and even his few remaining supporters, the problem increasingly is Mr. Assad himself.

Trained as an ophthalmologist, Mr. Assad came to power 11 years ago with the promise of leading Syria into a new era of economic and political opening. But when he stepped to the lectern for only the fourth national address since the uprising started, he instead appeared a shallow image of his father, Hafez al-Assad, relying exclusively on his repressive and violent security forces to stay in power. But those tactics have proved ineffective, and increasingly, as his isolation at home and abroad intensifies, many are predicting it is only a matter of time before his government falls.

Mr. Assad denied that his government ordered security forces to shoot anyone, despite a death toll that the United Nations says has spiraled beyond 5,000 since mid-March in a relentless crackdown. And he promised a referendum on a new constitution in March, a step that seemed pale before the scale of the crisis, which has emerged as one of the bloodiest of the uprisings that began in the Arab world a year ago.

But he never once deviated from the notion that he remains popular, a victim of a conspiracy financed by outsiders — offering the same kind of logic that was heard in Libya and Egypt before uprisings brought down longtime autocrats.

“When I rule, I rule because that it is the people’s will, and when I leave office, I leave because it is the people’s will,” Mr. Assad said in his first speech since June.

Standing behind a wooden lectern , the Syrian leader left the impression that he is still scrambling to find a solution to the turmoil that is undermining his grip on power and slouching toward sectarian civil war. But he appeared empty-handed, lacking any new strategies.

In the weeks after protests erupted in the southern town of Dara’a last March, Mr. Assad seemed to strike a conciliatory note, offering reheated promises of political reform.

But those who met with him privately in those early months said he soon moved from even a pretense of compromise to confrontation.

Right after the initial protests, a group of elders from Dara’a visited Mr. Assad, and as a show of respect they doffed their igals, the black braided ropes that Arabs used to keep their headclothes in place, said Charles Ayoub, editor of Ad Diyar, a newspaper in Lebanon. They said they would publicly pledge allegiance as long as he addressed the town’s concerns, which were aroused when local children, mostly adolescents, had been imprisoned for writing antigovernment slogans on the walls.

The president assured the elders that he would address their grievance.

Instead he deployed his tanks there almost immediately, Mr. Ayoub said. It was from that point that management of the crisis began to run off the rails, analysts said, leading to a continuous cycle of protest, arrest, torture — leavened with the occasional and dubious announcements of an amnesty for prisoners.

Mr. Assad promised an investigation, including whether a cousin Atif Najib, had any role as the head of security there. Though Mr. Najib was removed, the investigation never materialized.

Instead an entirely different narrative emerged, one that defied the evidence.

The marks on the boy’s body were the result of decay in the morgue, not torture, Mr. Assad told visitors. He echoed that line with ABC News last month.

“He believes that he needs to stay in power for the country’s well-being,” said David W. Lesch, an American professor of Middle East history who wrote a book about Mr. Assad. “That is part of his stubbornness in not engaging in the level of reform necessary to ameliorate the situation.”

People who have long known the Syrian leader believe it all comes down to his personality. In the schoolyard, his older brother Basil and his younger brother Maher were dominant types, surrounded by friends. Bashar, on the other hand, would often stand to one side, smiling shyly or making quiet jokes one friend. Basil’s death in a car accident brought Bashar, now 46, to power.

But his elite, sheltered education left him with the sense that he and the regime exist on a different plane, several analysts said. Hence in his speeches he tends to sound as if he is granting rights from on high.

Some analysts, including senior officials in the region, believe that Mr. Assad’s harder line came at the behest of government insiders and his family — with even his mother telling him to be tough like his father, according to some people who have met with Mr. Assad. But others discount that advice as unnecessary, saying that Mr. Assad had long sought to emulate his father.

As he has grown more isolated, and as his options have narrowed, he also started ignoring the advice of cabinet ministers and other senior advisers, analysts said. “When you are God, you don’t need counselors,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, a college friend who fell out with the president and ended up in exile.

The president’s perception of public support has fueled the narrative that he repeated on Tuesday, that outside forces—a combination of Muslim fundamentalists, Al Qaeda, Washington, Zionists and quisling Arabs — all form an anti-Syrian cabal.

Little evidence has emerged that Mr. Assad has any private doubts about his narrative, and those who have sought more information behind closed doors came away disappointed.

“They were talking about armed groups, but who are those people, where did they come from?” said a Lebanese analyst once close to Mr. Assad. “There are no specifics.”

A debate about whether Mr. Assad really leads Syria or just serves as a family figurehead resurfaced with the uprising. Speculation about where power might lie focuses on his younger brother, Maher, commander of the Republican Guard and the army’s elite Fourth Armored Division.

But those close to the regime believe that Mr. Assad is fully in control, though he subcontracts the nasty work of suppression to Maher and others.

His wife, Asma, a former investment banker, has not been heard from publicly since the uprising began, which analysts attribute to her lack of a role at the core of the government.

Mr. Assad watched what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, where the army stood on the sidelines and eventually pushed the leader out, and was determined not to repeat the same pattern in Syria. “The lesson he learned from Tunisia and Egypt was to make the army a player,” Mr. Abdel Nour said.

In his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Assad depicted the protest movement as solely the work of terrorists. “It must be hit with an iron fist,” he said, adding that “victory is near.”

But analysts see no such victory, believing Mr. Assad is instead caught in a trap largely of his own making. He lacks his father’s character, and, one Lebanese analyst noted, the circumstances that were in place when his father ruled are gone.

Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

A version of this article appears in print on January 11, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Outsiders Feed Unrest In Syria, Assad Says. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe